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Why Is Education Important?
Why is education important? Parents know education is important for a child's success in life. Exactly, why is education important? What are the details that make it important?
- Reportedly, college graduates make 100% higher pay than
high school graduates.
- Brain power every day is becoming far more important
than brawn power, even in blue collar jobs. For example, auto mechanics need to read and interpret manuals and computer printouts. To do this they need more schooling than mechanics of the past.
- Increased schooling develops verbal skills, which are
important in general, and, especially, in managerial positions.
- Attending college or university helps one perform the
day to day tasks of life more effectively, like locating the right doctor, searching for a good investment, finding a new job, or working out family challenges.
- Education is important because it helps one develop new
interests in life that may be entertaining or allow one to enter a new occupation.
- Education is important because it leads to more job
opportunities and a wider choice of jobs. Therefore, it is correlated with job satisfaction.
Warning! Education by itself may be used for good or bad purposes. The determining factor is heart, the heart of you, the parent. When I say heart, I mean heart as in heart and soul, as in heart in the right place. For more on this topic click, here, to read about the definition of unconditional love. So there are some answers to the question, why is education important. However, there is another answer to the question, why is education important. Education is important when it can maintain or even engender your interest in learning because then you will automatically become a lifelong learner.
Why is education important for parenting healthy children? What is the one most crucial reason education is important for parents? Because, if parents educate themselves, regarding their children, they can make choices and determine what is best for their children. No education, no choice! No education means someone else makes the choice for you and your children.
Let's looks at some of the choices, you can make, by clicking here.
Good parenting can help improve a child's school success. However, first, a parent must understand what education is. Another way of saying it: A parent must understand just what is happening to his child when that child is in school. If the school is forced to emphasize boring, rote learning in its program, a parent needs to know this is the case in order aid her child.
For more on why is education important, and is education what you think it is, click here.
By making learning fun, children realize learning is fun.
Is preschool the most important grade? Click here.
Positive parenting can improve success in school if you know why most kids fail.
Click here to discover the most common reason children fail to do well in school.
Want to help improve your children's chances for success in school? Get help now by reading this article on teacher and student relationship.
For things you can do at home to improve your child's chances for school success, click here.
Bored child? Surprise him out of his rut by making learning fun with playful parenting.
Good parenting is critical to school success. Click here, for the parenting advice page.
Click here for information on how to help your child get good grades now.
Click here, for surprising facts about public education.
To help readers evaluate their children's learning experience both in school and at home, I've included an important article by the famed neuroanatomist and researcher, Dr. Marian Diamond.
By comparing Dr. Diamond's causes of academic success to those in your school, you can decide why is education important or unimportant to your child. In her article,
"What are the Determinants of Children's Academic Successes and Difficulties?"
Dr. Diamond lists points that detail why a certain type of education is important for our children. When we ask, why is education important? It becomes important as more of Dr. Diamond's recommendations are included in the educational process. From our children's perspective, why is education important? It's not important to them when it proves uninteresting and unmeaningful to their lives. As you read her recommendations, notice where your child's education meets her recipe and where it doesn't.
Dr. Diamond writes: "Our recipe for an enriched environment to determine academic success:
- Includes setting the stage for enriching the cortex by
first providing a steady source of positive emotional support - love, encouragement, warmth and caring. Our old rats live longer with tender loving care.
- Provides a nutritious diet with enough protein,
vitamins, minerals and calories. We have shown that with a low protein diet during development the branches on the nerve cells in the cortex do not flourish to be able to respond to an enriched condition.
- Stimulates all the senses, but not necessarily all at
once. A multisensory enrichment develops all of the cortex; whereas, an input from a single task stimulates the growth of only a precise area of the brain. One example, growing up responsibly on a farm surrounded by clean fresh air with all of its multisensory input supplies a wealth of varied stimuli to develop a cortex.
- Has an atmosphere free of undue pressure and stress
but suffused with a degree of pleasurable intensity.
- Presents a series of novel challenges that are neither
too easy nor too difficult for the child at his or her stage of development.
- Allows for social interaction for a significant
percentage of activities; there is no doubt peers are intrigued with and enjoy each other.
- Promotes the development of a broad range of skills
and interests that are mental, physical, aesthetic, social and emotional.
- Gives the child an opportunity to choose many of his
or her own activities. Allow each unique brain to choose.
- Gives the child a chance to assess the results of his
or her efforts and to modify them. As he builds sand castles on the beach and admires his construction before a wave destroys them and he needs to learn to start over and resculpt.
- An enjoyable atmosphere that promotes exploration and
the fun of learning; rats living in enriched environments are more exploratory than those living in impoverishment.
- Above all, enriched environments allow the child to be
an active participant rather than a passive observer; a healthy body will have the energy to become involved.
Did you know that the negative effects of television are related to lower school grades, anxiety, aggression, obesity and suicide?
A nonenriched, impoverished environment, which can cause difficulties and a lack of success, will tend to be opposite in most of these ways, including:
- A vacillating or negative emotional climate
- A diet low in protein, vitamins, and minerals, and too
high or too low in calories
- Sensory deprivation
- High levels of stress and pressure
- Unchanging conditions lacking in novelty
- Long periods of isolation from caregivers and/or peers
- A heavy, dull atmosphere lacking in fun or in a sense
of exploration and the joy of learning
- A passive, rather than active involvement in some or
all activities
- Little personal choice of activities
- Little chance to evaluate results or effects and
change to different activities
- Development in a narrow, not panoramic, range of
interests"
A few notes, regarding Dr. Diamonds recommendations that prove pertinent to our question, why is education important?
- Dr. Diamond placed a positive emotional educational
environment at the top of the list as an aid to learning. Why is education important for our children? When they feel its importance through a positive learning environment.
- From Dr. Diamond's recommendations, it is obvious how
the increased emphasis on rote learning in our educational system is harming our children's learning?
- From studying Dr. Diamond's list, can you note any
possible reasons why your child may be having trouble in school?
We end this section with a message from Dr. Diamond. She says:
"Let me take one example, when it comes to providing toys and activities for young children, there is, in general an inverse relationship between the specificity and elaborateness of a toy and its ability to excite the imagination. A cast-off cardboard box can become a doll house, a puppet stage, a school or an alien planet. Tools for exploring, a magnifying glass, an old tape recorder, a map, can open doors in the mind, as can the artifacts of make believe. The more pressure the parent puts on a child to produce something specific, the harder it is for the child to express creativity and imagination.
All of these have their role to play in brain development. BUT we have also learned that too much stimulation is detrimental. The cerebral cortex does not show significant growth with too much stimulation as it does with a moderate amount. The brain needs time to transfer information into its association cortex. Allow the child time to think about what is happening and what is coming next. Allow for ample free time too. Creative efforts need time to utilize what has been stored in the brain. DO NOT OVER STIMULATE."
Why is education important? Because we've learned that over stimulation is bad for our children's learning. Why is education important? Because it teaches us how to teach our children so they will eagerly learn. Dr. Diamond's recipe is backed by years of research. What's more, it makes sense. As you read, "Why is education important," and other articles in the education section, as well as the parenting section, refer back from time to time to Dr. Diamond's recipe for academic success. I think you will note how positive parenting, playful parenting, "sooner" than possible counseling, etc., complement Dr. Diamond's recipe and help increase a child's chances for academic success.
Finally, why education is important, and why parenting is important for children? Because a good education is important to the health and future of our children, but it takes good parenting to determine when our kids are being educated properly and when they are not being educated but treated like rote learning robots. In the final analysis education is important when it becomes important, not only to parents, but in the minds of our kids, for it is our kids who are being educated; therefore, education must be made meaningfully important to them, and be taught in stimulating environments- even if sometimes it takes a parent to make this happen.

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